Deep thoughts and silliness

OK, it’s Friday and you lot don’t have anything to do either. But take heart, folks. The Great Beyond has just pointed to the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition at the NHM. Lots of goodies there, but I did like this one:

I don’t care if it’s Halloween. If it says it’s a zombie that means it’s dead, and I’m hungry.
All it needs is a better caption than mine. Anyone care to offer one up?

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Browsing through the latest and greatest at NN, I noticed this new event posted by Matt

Clarke’s Cabinets of Cures: Blood, Mermaids and Madness

Am I the only one who thinks it sounds like Maxine’s critique of Henry’s LabLit novel?

I’ve been reading an article about hunting mortality, where the authors ask how we should arrange our hunting so as to mimic natural mortality. But they leave aside one very important question – why should we want to mimic natural mortality?

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I did my civic duty today, and braved the storms to vote. The Helsinki municipal elections aren’t quite as vital to the world’s interests as some other elections this autumn, but then they do boring things in Finland like talk about policy. With a bit of luck I’ve unwittingly just voted for the next Toni Halme?

One thing we discussed at the ScienceBlogging09 meeting in London in August was the relationship between blogging and more formal scientific communications. Henry Gee suggested that blogs are for half-baked ideas, that can then be criticized in the blogospheric oven before being let out into the formal literature in the knowledge that the idea has been heated through, with a nice glazing applied. It’s odd, then, to read something in the formal literature that is less well baked than most blog posts.

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An email has just been sent round our ecologists – one of those periodic attempts to organize communal storage in freezers. It included this little titbit (with my emphasis):

During this month all the stuff in the room 1303 should be labelled properly (*including possible carcasses*). Unlabelled stuff will be considered garbage and accordingly thrown away in the near future.

Well, as everyone is potentially a carcass, does this mean they’ll throw away anyone without a name tag?
If Mike stops posting in a couple of weeks time, we’ll know where to look or him – in the biodegradable bins, hopefully.

During last couple of days I was in a meeting of our Centre of Excellence in Evolutionary Genetics and Physiology, of which I’m a member. One of the issues I talked about and we discussed was using Web 2.0 ideas to help communication. This is a particular problem for the centre because there are three research groups in two cities, which are about two hours’ travel apart. We discussed some of the things we could try, but there are still a few questions remaining, so I thought I would use a Web 2.0 technique to help find some answers. In other words, I’ll blog about them and hope someone is nice enough to tell me what to do.

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I was writing a post for Open Access day yesterday, but was distracted by other things. I came back to it today, and continued. Then I realized that the points I wanted to make had already been made, either in my post or in the comments.

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This is something I hope they never do to my work:

Joint RSS/MRC/NIHR HTA meeting on Futility Analysis in Clinical Trials

(sorry, I can’t get the link to go to the right page)
Ah, a quick google helps me find out that futility analysis is a form of interim analysis, i.e. you look at the data before the experiment is finished to see if it is worth continuing.
I have come across experiments where that should have been done that before the start.

I’m glad we didn’t have YouTube when I was an undergrad, I might have become a developmental biologist…

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